Burning Man is an event focused on community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance held annually in the western United States. The name of the event comes from its culminating ceremony: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred to as the Man, that occurs on the penultimate night of Burning Man, which is the Saturday evening before Labor Day. The event has been located since 1991 at Black Rock City in northwestern Nevada, a temporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert about 100 miles (160 km) north-northeast of Reno. As outlined by Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the event is guided by ten principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.
The Civic Center in San Francisco, California, is an area located a few blocks north of the intersection of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue that contains many of the city's largest government and cultural institutions. It has two large plazas and a number of buildings in classical architectural style. The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, the United Nations Charter was signed in the Veterans Building's Herbst Theatre in 1945, leading to the creation of the United Nations. It is also where the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco was signed. The San Francisco Civic Center was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places on October 10, 1978.
Larry Harvey was an American artist, philanthropist and activist. He was the main co-founder of the Burning Man event, along with his friend Jerry James.
Hayes Valley is a neighborhood in the Western Addition district of San Francisco, California. It is located between the historical districts of Alamo Square and the Civic Center. Victorian, Queen Anne, and Edwardian townhouses are mixed with high-end boutiques, restaurants, and public housing complexes. The neighborhood gets its name from Hayes Street, which was named for Thomas Hayes, San Francisco's county clerk from 1853 to 1856 who also started the first Market Street Railway franchise.
David Best is an internationally renowned American sculptor. He is well known for building immense temples out of recycled wood sheets for the Burning Man festivals, where they are then burnt to the ground in a spectacle of light and heat.
City College of San Francisco is a public community college in San Francisco, California. Founded as a junior college in 1935, the college plays an important local role, annually enrolling as many as one in nine San Francisco residents. CCSF is accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC).
The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) is the City agency that champions the arts as essential to daily life by investing in a vibrant arts community, enlivening the urban environment and shaping innovative cultural policy in San Francisco, California. The commission oversees Civic Design Review, Community Investments, Public Art, SFAC Galleries, The Civic Art Collection, and the Art Vendor Program.
The Burning Man Project is the organization that annually plans, manages, and builds Burning Man on the dry lake of the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada. The company coordinates the year-round, behind-the-scenes work needed to build and remove a temporary city of 80,000 people.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American artist and filmmaker. Her work combines art with social commentary, particularly on the relationship between people and technology. Leeson's work in media-based technology helped legitimize digital art forms. She is based in San Francisco, California.
Southern Exposure (SoEx) is a not-for-profit arts organization and alternative art space founded in 1974 in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. It was originally founded as a grassroots, cooperative art gallery in conjunction with Project Artaud which was a live/work artist community. By the 1980s, they converted the gallery to a community space for supporting emerging artists.
BAVC Media, previously known as the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), is a nonprofit organization that works to connect independent producers and underrepresented communities to emerging media technologies. It was founded in 1976 in San Francisco.
Favianna Rodriguez is an American artist and activist. She has self-identified as queer and Latina with Afro-Peruvian roots. Rodriguez began as a political poster designer in the 1990s in the struggle for racial justice in Oakland, California. Rodriguez is known for using her art as a tool for activism. Her designs and projects range on a variety of different issues including globalization, immigration, feminism, patriarchy, interdependence, and genetically modified foods. Rodriguez is a co-founder of Presente.org and is the Executive Director of Culture Strike, "a national arts organization that engages artists, writers and performers in migrant rights. "
The Civic Center Music Hall is a performing arts center located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It was constructed in 1937 as Municipal Auditorium and renamed in 1966. The facility includes the Thelma Gaylord Performing Arts Theatre, the Freede Little Theatre, CitySpace, the Meinders Hall of Mirrors and the Joel Levine Rehearsal Hall.
The Oklahoma City Ballet is a professional dance company and school located in Oklahoma City. The company began under the artistic direction of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo dancers Yvonne Chouteau and Miguel Terekhov in the Science and Arts Foundation building on the Oklahoma City Fairgrounds,
The Global Lives Project is a nonprofit organization consisting of volunteer filmmakers and photographers, programmers and engineers, architects and designers, students and scholars. The mission of the organization is to collaboratively build a video library of human life experience that reshapes how individuals conceive of cultures, nations and people outside of their own communities.
Rebar Art and Design Studio, stylized as REBAR, is an interdisciplinary studio founded in 2004 and based in San Francisco, United States, operating at the intersection of art, design.and activism. The group's work encompasses visual and conceptual public art, landscape design, urban intervention, temporary performance installation, digital media and print design. Rebar's projects often intersect with contemporary urban ecology, new urbanism, and psychogeography practices and theory.
Mark Grieve is an American contemporary artist. He practices in a variety of media including found objects and large metal sculpture as well as site-specific installations, performance, and public art.
The David Bohnett Foundation is a global private foundation that gives grants to organizations that focus on its core giving areas – primarily Los Angeles area programs and LGBT rights in the United States, as well as leadership initiatives and voter education, gun violence prevention, and animal language research. As of 2021, the foundation has donated over $120 million to nonprofit organizations and initiatives.
United Nations Plaza is a 2.6-acre (1.1 ha) plaza located on the former alignments of Fulton and Leavenworth Streets—in the block bounded by Market, Hyde, McAllister, and 7th Street—in the Civic Center of San Francisco, California. It is located 1⁄4 mi (0.40 km) east of City Hall and is connected to it by the Fulton Mall and Civic Center Plaza. Public transit access is provided by the BART and Muni Metro stops at the Civic Center/UN Plaza station, which has a station entrance within the plaza itself.
Richmond Art Center is a nonprofit arts organization based in Richmond, California, founded in 1936.
